A Play of Gods Among Men
by Jade Rowwood
Summary: He looked at the quivering blade quizzically. She spoke softly as he strained with his own thoughts.
1. Nothing but Death and Echoes

The dust had settled into a gray-green burial shroud over the ancient coffin's lid, and oh did she want to disturb that hateful mocking dust where it lay. One thing held her hand back from the lid. Her hand held immense power between her fingers, it glowed a faint silver gray like fog out like noxious fumes from a sewer grate. She lifted her right hand and watched the ghostly figures in the fog dance over her knuckles and slowly, she opened the hand that held the last wild power source this side of Mideel.  
The tiny white blaze drifted down from her palm and landed lightly, almost dreamlike on the coffin's dusty surface. Her amber brown eyes watch the thing do its dance on the dust laden surface leaving lines behind it. Moving faster, the blaze joined its curving lines as it moved across the lid. Faster and faster it painted in the dust a perfect picture of the figure beneath the lid. Quicker and sharper did the figure take shape in the dust. All at once, the blaze finished and laid still on the dust figure's brow. Hand still outstretched, she watched the stone lift slowly from the dust painting and nestle itself softly into her weathered palm amidst the dirty weather lines of her hand. All along she stared unbelieving.  
Here he was. Here he died as that bastard said true. Her eyes lingered on his partially closed eyes, almost if he were dozing with them open, then they drifted lower, they found the wound.  
Yes, the bastard spoke true, but they both were dead now. Her lips twitched into a wolf like snarl that made her look all the less human. She hooked her long fingers into the crack of the coffin, that bastard that killed him even had the audacity to not close the lid fully.

_ Suppose it don't matter now._ she thought, the wolf grin becoming that of a fanged serpent, the skin around her eyes turning a faint sky blue. _Good he's dead._ The skin on her face began to split into scale like segments from her exertion, yet she lifted the lid and set it on the cold stones beside his cold grave. She caught her reflection in a small icy puddle on the other side of the coffin. The creature watching her from the waters' surface stared from amber brown eyes, the only human bit about it. Her shoulder length white hair had stiffened into long lethal looking horns which curled almost lovingly around her snake like face. Her nose and mouth had elongated into a sky blue muzzle covered in smoothed scales which protruded into crystal patterns. She held her curled hand to her face and watched the webbing between her already long fingers slip down to their unusually long tips, her nails becoming great white talons.  
Long breaths pulled down into her cooling lungs which exhaled burned the skin of her throat. It worked. Her blood cooled and she calmed as she metamorphosed back into her gangly human form. Soon enough, the pressure her elongated arms and her lengthening body exerted on her poor black shirt and matching jacket eased as her sudden rapid growth reversed. A seem screamed out and split along her black pant leg before she noticed she had been changing, one of her worn boots groaned miserably and soon enough the other sung out too.  
Soon the pain screaming along her body quieted and she turned back to the man before her. Human hand held above him, she let the stone ball drift down to him. He lay exactly like his portrait, hands crossed over his stomach, long black hair laying every which way, red cloak wrapped around him concealing his wound. She could see it, she could taste the air of bitter rot about him. Another few days too late and she would have found him bloated like a deer on the roadside. Her eyes took in all. The way his ribcage sloped alarmingly inward, his sallow almost yellowy color of his once handsome face. The way the flies had buzzed madly around the coffin before she smote their tiny meaningless lives with an icy glance.  
The worst was the wound its self. Stabbed in the heart like some weak minded vampire of the past.  
_** That's not all…that bastard did something, can't you smell it?**_ the tiny stone ball hissed at her, its voice condensed with pictures, memories that it picked up from the room. It sent them almost exultantly from beneath its fog cloak, and she watched. Watched the man from the bar and another man in a black cloak, its hood pulled over his face, lift the lid like she had done as to not disturb the dust. Watched the one under the hood pull the knife (which was now in her possession) from his belt as the other sniggered quietly.

And she saw. The way the blade fell, buried in the sleeping mans' heart. His black shirt and red cloak concealed all the blood as the man shuddered and died in his sleep. Horror wrote itself in her near human eyes as she watched the two men unbutton the dead man's shirt, then leaning in closer, they blocked her vision, but she knew. She knew.  
The rib cage told all. Unbuttoning his shirt like those shitless assassins had done, she balked at her find, and stepping backwards, she vomited uncontrollably into another open coffin near by. The stone tittered uncontrollably at her as she buttoned his shirt looking the other way. Yes, the rib cage told all.  
"You know what to do." she spoke wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve. The ball seemed to sag in mid air as if it were as drowsy as the man's eyes showed him. It slipped between his cloak and his shirt and nested itself in his stab wound. A slow jerk twisted his body as his left hand raised to the air. His synthetic claws touched the stone above his heart as he slowly sat up.  
He stared blankly at her. "You are ?" he spoke after studying her for a moment. Ignoring the question, she drew the blade (the same as the one the stone showed her) and as fast as a cat strikes, she jammed it into the top of the coffins' edge. He looked at the quivering blade quizzically. She spoke softly as he strained with his own thoughts.  
"You died."


	2. That Old Mako Mix

She watched him with eyes that promised a slow and painful death to all that crossed her. He now stood leaning against the wall with the knife in his hands.  
"This is _my_ murder weapon?" he spoke quietly watching a few flakes of dried blood fall from the thing's blood channel beneath his fingernail. Then after a pause "Who are _you_, my murderer?" That wolfish smile returned to her pale face.  
"Would we have awoken you if we were?" she spoke softly watching him turn the bloodied knife in his hands. He looked back up at her in puzzlement.  
"We? I see no one else." he watched her eyes carefully. She wasn't lying, and he knew that. There was someone, or something else that journeyed here with her, something that was in the room with them, watching and listening to them. He could sense it.  
A presence as over powering as gray-white fog.  
"Mr. Valentine, my _partner_ and I have been looking for you since we overheard a drunk in a bar boast that he killed you. Don't worry about him though, we _dealt_ with that man." A flash of malevolence entered her eyes and all at once winked out of existence.

Behind those amber brown eyes, she was back in Midgar, at a bar in Sector 6, enjoying a rough draught of what the bar tender called the Mako Mix (basically it was a large jar hidden behind the other bottles on the shelf which contained the unused swigs drunks left in their cans, bottles and glasses, which the tender used to refill the jar every night after the drunks left. He even used the highly condensed liquor that was left from years ago. Some said he even used old bottles of machine fluid which he bought off the pack rat weapons' shop owner, but none could be sure. But the Mako Mix was the cheapest drink there, and probably the most lethal. She enjoyed the risk of slow organ failure) and left to her own silent thoughts as the stone ball rolled back and forth on the bar in front of her. It enjoyed making people stare in disbelief as it moved on its own accord, round and round the rim of her glass, then all at once, scudding silently the length of the counter making the drunks gape and snatch at it in futility. She watched as a single man wrapped his fingers around the mischievous sphere, only to pull away with a yelp as he stared at the singed stumps of what had been four fingers and a thumb a moment ago. She chuckled holding her left hand out slightly beneath her coat as the little blaze danced over the counter to meet her. The man yelled out as the terribly hot blood came rushing from the blackened remains. Hiding her smirk behind a feigned gulp of her Mako Mix, she watched the other drunks stare stupidly at the ash remains laying on the counter, like five burnt and curled cigarettes, lay his fingers.  
She chuckled as the drunk yelled again and again, the others staring stupidly about like inbred Chocobos.  
"Klyde, Klyde, 'tsokay. I took down that vampire piece of shit, I can take down this skinny lil' bitch." a drunk farther down the bar called to the screaming man. The one named 'Klyde' was attracting attention, but he wasn't going to be the only spectacle that night in that bar. Death was coming on gray wings like a thunderhead. "'Cmere bitch!" She turned to the man, her eyes swimming like great gold sharks in their sockets, there was nothing human about them now. When her eyes met his, his blood froze, and he dropped what was in his hand. A knife. It's blade smeared in dried blood, a few long black hairs clung in the dried mess. Her raptor's eyes widened horrifyingly. Silence, Klyde was suddenly quiet, as was everyone else, but she didn't notice. She never noticed how their eyes never left her rapidly mutating body, never noticed that when she made her way towards her would be murderer that the bar tender was groping for his shotgun beneath the bar. Little would that help him against the creature now advancing on one of his regulars. The air in the room crackled terrifyingly as the little blaze flew from her lengthening hand and excited the stale air into a gale in miniature. Her last bit of sense before her mind became a carnivore was to remove her jacket from her widening shoulders before they could tear it in half. She stopped. Straightening to a height of a towering nine and a half feet, she stared around the room. All stared at her, a snarl exulted over her full serpent face as she watched their unbelieving faces. A loud harsh bark snapped from her jaws making the people in the bar draw back.  
Her snarling face spread into a fanged grin of a demon from this side of hell.

_**"Any of you worms who wants to drink away their lives another day, GET OUT! OUT NOW BEFORE SHE KILLS YOU!"**_ the ball reeled through the air around her head as it blared this message, not in words, but in cold dark images and breaths of wind that screeched for its voice. They didn't need to be told twice. Some scattered like leaves in this synthetic storm, but most drew away through the door slowly. Scared as they were, most stopped at the door to watch, they saw their friend and fellow drunk meet his end that night, but still they watched.  
_Run Dean!_ They mouthed past her back towards the man staring up at her in terror. He never saw their silent cries.  
"This 'vampire'," she spoke quietly lifting the knife from the floor in hand, which was becoming a long ribbed wing with gray blue sails, and set it on the counter next to them. "Who was it?" Dean stared in wonder at her. She waited patiently as she neared her full other form. He stuttered something incoherent, and the sudden acidic tang of urine filled the air as the man filled his pants. The stone snapped at his exposed ears and balding head with tiny green flashes of lightening from inside its cloak of fog. The tatters of her clothing littered the floor around her webbed feet as she stared down on the man like a starved dog would stare down a cornered rabbit. "Well?" she spoke almost soothingly. The man relaxed visibly.

"Vincent Valentine" he spoke in a soft sigh. Her face softened when she heard this, and Dean smiled, but all at once, her face became the face of a murderer enjoying his final kill. And Deans' face contorted in horror and infinite pain as a set of three long ivory like claws forced their way through his exposed abdomen.

"Where? Or can't you speak now?" she hissed lifting him from his seat. He stared at her snarling face while impaled on her clawed foot like a dog turd on a boot.  
"N Nible" he gagged on bile and alcohol rising from the pain. She turned, balancing lightly on her other foot, and almost gently flicked him from her claws to the other side of the room where he landed in a heap, grabbing at his spilling innards trying to force them back into his broken body. She walked a few steps to the door and stopped.  
"Finish up." she spoke turning slightly to look at the torn man laying on the floor. The ball floated down to the struggling man, snapping green lightening and dropping tiny water like globes of rain colored fire beneath it which burned small holes in Deans' clothing. And he looked up in time to see the taker of his life descend on him like a predatory bird on the bar sized storm. The sphere buzzed madly like many huge saw blades as it spun around his prostrate form. He jerked once as the stone buried itself in his back. It immerged seconds later out his leg, then shot down into the back of his neck. It sped up each time it flew out of him like a bullet until it became a gray and red halo around his jerking body. Its' work lasted only a few seconds, when it finished, Dean was no more, what was left was a gelled mass of bone, muscle, clothes, brains and even some pulverized floor boards beneath him which gave out and took him into the dark basement below.

"Asshole." she whispered stalking towards the door as the horrified drunks staggered away from the blood spattered bar. Behind her was a single dwindling repeating blood track. The stone flew after her, dripping Deans' blood onto her flanks as she tore the more persistent remainders of her clothes that clung to her.  
_**"You won't go to him naked will you. You need clothes."**_ the bloodied sphere chattered companionably to her when they reached the night air outside. "You're sick." she breathed past her blood splattered jacket in her jaws as she winged into the narrow sky of Midgar.  
The look Vincent Valentine was giving her snapped her from the bar memory from a few days ago.  
"How did you dispose of him? Surely the body would've alerted the authorities to your dealings. And they could've followed you by your description and travel routes, it couldn't have been that easily done." he spoke quietly.  
"Sir, you don't understand." she smiled. "There was no body."

_-Hello, Jade Rowwood of the Long Road here. I'm not very good at author's notes, but I'll give it a shot. Oh, before I forget, I own none of the characters except the stone, the metamorphosing girl, Dean and Klyde. Hey, but I wished Vincent was mine_ smiles mischievously_, Hell, wouldn't you? SilverKnight, thank you for the review. I will try to answer questions too (my stories most of the time make no sense). If I told ya what happened, I'd give away the plot_ winks_ I'm sorry, but I can't answer that question yet. It will be answered soon though. Thanks for lookin'._

_-Jade Rowwood_


	3. Destruction's Footsteps

It took only a few brief moments to explain to Vincent what became of Dean (leaving out the details of the story showing the changeling of her dual nature and the fact that her partner was an animated inanimate object) but he didn't look satisfied.  
"What business do you have in a bar?" he looked at her cautiously. Some were truly above the petty laws of men, but not by choice. Some ran on circumstances' dark deep forest roads. His crimson eyes bored into her darkening amber brown ones like wood burrowing insects. "You don't look of age."

"Well," she flushed a red that rivaled the hue of his eyes. Her business face faltered under that stare, a stare that could melt young girls hearts. Or burn them if need be. Could she honestly lie to this man? A man which she followed through the news not so long ago, a man that challenged a veritable God himself. A man who she had been sent inadvertently after. "We're talking about Midgar here. There are prostitutes there half my age." She did not enjoy speaking at all under that icy unblinking gaze, let alone lying. She averted her eyes down to the floor where they found an interesting stone to look at. Pain irrupted inside her skull as the fog shrouded blaze forced its way inside her thoughts from its perch in Vincent's stab wound.  
_** Don't be stupid! He knows now, I won't hide myself forever. Gods! I thought you knew me. If you did, you'd know I hate hiding! Now stop acting your age and act like the adult you soon will be!**_ The stone screeched in her head as Vincent watched her grimace, fully unaware that the pain she felt was transmitted from a source on his person. Like a parasite, it wormed through her mind destroying all thoughts it touched, eating away at all the memories in her head. Any more and she would be empty.  
_ Fine you sad excuse for a fossilized shit,_ she yelled back with her thoughts, beating back the barrage of snaking tendrils of its thoughts as it consumed hers. _I'll tell him._ The pain rolled off her mind in waves and she breathed shaking, trying to remember who she was. Breath came to her easier as the last tendrils left her ruined mind.  
"I am Aulia." she spoke pulling in shaking breaths that continually settled and slightly repaired her battered mind. "The one I work for doesn't matter now, but I am a Gatherer. I am paid to find _oddities_." She grimaced again as the stone mentally slapped her.  
"Such as? What was your last gathering?" Vincent spoke quietly holding her gaze again in his cold red stare.  
"My employer sent me to fetch something, she is a truly strange one herself, I guess you have to be in this profession." Aulia shrugged again as the stone struck her mind to mind.  
_** I didn't tell you to say that much!**_ It howled in her head like a rabid beast.  
"What did you bring her?" he spoke again watching for the traces of lies.  
"The head of a man in high esteem of the populace." the grin that brought to mind the face of a wolf returned to her face. He didn't look too surprised.  
"You're a Death Gatherer then?" he spoke almost to the air itself, as if she wasn't there. The stone struck relentlessly at her unguarded mind.  
"That, that is my partner." she gestured towards his chest, and for the first time, he noticed how his ribs rattled brokenly beneath a gray white stone entombed in a tiny rain cloud. He touched his slowly rotting fingers to the stones' smooth and shining surface only to bring them away with blood flowing through them alive and well for an instant.  
"Who was this?" he breathed watching his hand die again. The stone let out a pulse of energy in its moment of connecting again into the living world that brought Vincent's body close to full life. He gasped in anguish as the nerves in his broken chest cried out. He staggered backwards, grabbing at his shattered breast bone, almost like he could repair those bones. Aulia moved to his side and braced the slightly taller man against her strong shoulder while he died again.  
"Another sin," he gasped. "Let me be dead." She stared into his pain wracked face and felt a sudden loathing towards her employer and that sick bitch's needs. His breathing slowly eased away into nothing and she dared another look into his face. His red eyes locked on her brown ones and he shook her grasp from his shoulders to lean heavily on his coffin.  
"You didn't answer." he said staring into her eyes like he wanted to pierce her very thoughts.  
"What?" she spoke trying in vain to avoid that one question.  
"Who was this? Or won't you tell me?"

She sighed. "He was" but broke off at the sound of someone moving slowly down the dungeon stairs. She stared into the darkness beyond the open door to the hallway, the sound of feet moving toward them over stone. A click tore her eyes from the door. She turned to Vincent, gun in hand, he stood staring out the door.  
"Draw your weapons." he advised in a low whisper. The stone lay hidden among his clothes, he looked fully alive.  
"I don't have any." her face lightened in a cocky smirk. He shrugged listening to the muffled voices echoing down the hall. "I don't need any. Maybe you should play dead?" He stared at her, his eyes almost displayed disgust at her comment.  
"No." he whispered.  
"Fine." she grumbled, her fingers changing and elongating as they would when she'd need her wings, her nails becoming pearly talons. She remained a human while her hands danced along the boundaries of normal hands and claws of a beast. She stood, five foot eleven inches near the six foot Vincent, side by side with the dead man. His eyes found her raised hands and brandished claws.

There was another like him, yet they were never similar. She caught his gaze.  
"These," she raised her hands a little higher above her chest. "another story for another time." He nodded. Bits of conversation drifted to their ears from the new comers.

"Sorry to tell you, Sir Drake." they heard a woman say. "We've found what's become of Dean."

And the footsteps drew all the nearer.

_-There, she has a name. After much pestering from Gene, Aulia has her name. I'm still open for questions. Told ya' the story would begin to make sense.  
-Jade Rowwood_


	4. Destruction's Hold

"Sir Drake, it's an ambush!" the woman screamed. The poor thing was the first person to enter the room, and the last to cry in terror that day. But, she was the first to be caught in the claws of a true dragon that day.  
"Hello girlie! I've been waiting to speak to your boss today, as was my business associate, Mr. Valentine. Oh, Sir Drake, I believe we're at an advantage. Throw your weapons down and enter the room slowly or we'll kill this little Shirley here." Aulia barked savage laughter into the back of the young woman's head, her breath disheveling the blonde-brown hair and making the captive whimper in terror as she glanced sidelong at the dead man. He felt a slight pang of regret for allowing the new comer to be captured by Aulia before they could ascertain whether she where friend or foe, but Aulia seemed to know what she was doing, so he rode with it. Out of the dark, a slender double barreled shotgun hissed across the floor to stop silent at Vincent's feet.  
"There's another one with him, fully armed and quiet as a cat. Drake always travels in a group of three, him, a commoner," Aulia whispered side mouthed to Vincent, jerked a little at 'commoner' to emphasized the captives' role and went on. "and another." she glanced into the shadows, her nostrils flaring, eyes growing to huge pale gold silted orbs which hungrily took in the dark as her head swiveled this way and that. "This one has no scent. He may be like you." she spoke devoid of all the smug cockiness from before, a fact that told him the true depth to the severity of the situation. A depth that could be life threatening, what did he care?  
"Let 'er go." a short hooded man spoke stepping through the doorway with his hands over his head. He looked almost comical in his overly large black robe, a robe much like the one of the taller captive woman struggling in Aulia's clawed hands. He could barely reach the height of Aulia's collar bone, so he stared up at the dead man, the changeling, and the captured woman from the depths of his ebon robe. He pulled back the hood and stared boldly at them from dark black sunken eyes, his bald head glistening with perspiration. His left cheek had swelled into an ungainly black and blue bulge which threatened to close his left eye.  
"I see Spade's disciplinary actions still stand. At least he didn't do the same thing to you that he did to your predecessor. Tisk, tisk, tisk. The penalty for dropped merchandise is universal, is it not? A good grinding. You do know what a grinding is don't you? The Seer takes and tears your pants off, and then"  
"Stop Laulia, stop it. Let Jggeene go." Drake interrupted Aulia looking extremely sick at the thought of the grinding. He was suddenly pale beneath the large lump on his face.  
"Don't tell me that that overgrown fist mark on your face has rattled your reasoning, tell the other to come out first, then we'll parley." Aulia spoke cloyingly shaking the woman before her and succeeding to force a yelp from the frightened woman.  
"'Ate ta ssee it go down 'ike that." Drake's eyes drifted down to the shotgun on the floor. Aulia had a split second to gasp, then it all went to Hell. Geene ripped herself free of Aulia's grip, whirled on the white haired woman and pinned her to the wall beneath a pair of curved copper short blades that were concealed within the baggy sleeves of her black robe. Drake made a grasping gesture with one hand and made a 'come forward' gesture with his other. Before Vincent could blink, the shotgun at his feet whirled onto its butt plate from the force of a large hidden switchblade placed between its two barrels. The force of the spring loaded blade had forced the gun into the air, embedding the blade in his already mutilated chest cavity. Before the force of the blade struck him fully, Drake had rushed forward, grasped the triggers and fired twice into Vincent's unfeeling body. A split second later, Drake had reloaded both barrels, shot off both rounds, loaded again, and fired the fifth and sixth shots, blowing large holes through Vincent.  
_ Why?_ Vincent's sleep befuddled mind wondered, he was startled when his mind got an answer.  
_** It's who you are, now get off your dead ass and help Aulia! Unlike you, she can still feel these attacks, and maybe soon she'll be joining you. I can't do jack shit from powering you, but you can, now help her sorry ass.**_ His mind received an image of a man with short greenish-black hair and silver eyes scowling at him through a dark roiling storm cloud. The ninth and tenth shots brought him into the warped plane of reality to which he was accustomed to and he pistol whipped Drake on his already swollen left cheek. Drake reeled, his ochre eyes rolled wildly toward all corners of the room, and Vincent opened on him with his own fast gun. Drake took three slugs in the chest, and a fourth in his shoulder above his heart. As Drake fell, Vincent leaped over him and punched the woman who pinned Aulia on the back of her neck with his synthetic hand, felling her in a heap. Aulia staggered away from him, her eyes widened, one of Geene's blades had slashed the side of her neck, catching one of its large blood ways and nearly parting it in two.  
Neither noticed the third, nor did the third notice the true third in Aulia and Vincent's partnership. Aulia's eyes had rolled up into her head, she left consciousness with her hand clamped on the vital artery in her throat. Vincent stared at her for a moment, then moved back to his coffin intending to continue his oblivion, but stopped. Hanging from the doorway was what looked like a small shriveled child, its head pointed towards the floor, empty eye sockets staring towards the Hell where it belonged. In its silently screaming jaws where four teeth, fangs really, its skinless scalp sporting few hairs left that brushed the floor in long gray strands.  
_** Don't stare at her. If she sees you, it won't matter if you can feel pain or not. It won't matter if your dead or not. Get Aulia out of here. You yourself are marked, so run! Get as far away as you can!**_ the same voice spoke in his mind. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a man with short greenish-black hair staring at him through eyes of ghostly silver.  
"What do you suggest?" Vincent whispered daring to look at the silver eyed man full in the face.  
_**This one is a wanderer, it can't touch a grave or it will be banished into the world it was torn from.**_ The silver eyed man smiled and Vincent noticed how tall he was, he was at least a full head taller than Vincent. _**Place yourself and Aulia in these coffins here and close the lids. I'll lead her away.  
**_ So the newcomer spoke and Vincent never saw his lips move.


	5. Wall of the Dead Man

Vincent never questioned as he dragged Aulia over the rough stone floor of the mansions' subterranean tomb to one of the gaping death boxes near his own. Placing her ungracefully in a pool of cold vomit (which he puzzled over its origination for a moment), he replaced the lid over her and the coffin's already crumbling occupant beneath her, the latter didn't seem to mind. He moved silently back to his own resting place and stared down at the strange portrait on the coffin lid, which he hadn't noticed before.

_**It's you.**_ The silver eyed man spoke silently drifting over to Vincent's side on bare feet a few inches off the floor.

_I've noticed_. Vincent replied in his darkened mind, images of someone else, someone he longed for long ago pulsing back to life in his finally wide awake mind. _You need not speak the obvious. What do you plan to do with the one in the doorway? _Vincent stared at the taller man. Beneath the mat of greenish-black hair was a face set in lines of stern expression and worry, lines that marked a relatively young and handsome face. Dark mist obscured the man's otherwise naked body, causing him to look at all times a man of different body structure, tall and thin, then short and fat, yet by far, he was no where under seven feet.

_ **I plan to lead her off of your trail. Once we leave, you and Aulia must leave. Do not touch your portrait, it is a ritual designed to bind my power to you for a short while.**_ The man smiled at Vincent, yet his silver eyes shown sorrow, a sorrow Vincent could relate to. _**I didn't know you cared for someone. If you wish to see the one you long for so, go with Aulia to the North Lady, she can bring broken connections back together, you can trust me on that. **_Again, immeasurable sorrow entered the ghostly silver eyes of the specter, he looked towards the thing waiting in the doorway.

_**I go.**_ Vincent nodded as the man floated to the doorway. He climbed into the coffin and reaching over the side, pulled the lid back into place. The stone ball burned savagely at his heart and he could feel an unspeakable dread pulse from its misty depths. The construct of the man that the stone once had been spoke again to his shadowy mind.

_** You will know when we leave.**_ The ghostly man drifted to a halt before the doorway and stared unblinkingly into the eyeless sockets of the Dread Child.

_ Aulia never answered me. Who are you?_ Vincent wondered silently in the darkness of the coffin. The silver eyed man smiled to himself at the question.

_**Riven.**_ The air burst apart with eardrum shattering screams, screams that sounded like seven different voices screeching all at once.

The silver glow left the stone ball, fading to gray, then to total black.

Darkness bled through his closed eyes and penetrated his brain. He couldn't remember anything, but he did know something had awoken him. He opened his eyes and stared up into the blackness. Soft muffled sobs rushed through the crushing darkness to his ears. On a whim, he raised his hands and they brushed something soft and velvety. He pushed up and a crack of weak light nearly blinded him. Something cautioned him subconsciously to place the object carefully beside whatever it was that he was laying in. He sat up and was assaulted by a seen of carnage, a small man bled to death in one corner, a young blonde haired woman laid sprawled out near what he was laying in, a coffin. The woman's head had struck the coffins' edge and had laid her out with some of her brains spilled out onto the rocky floor in this place of bones. Something rolled from his black shirt, a small plain black stone ball which seemed to his blank mind completely unimportant. He noticed that dropped at the edge of the coffin near him was a bloodied knife which seemed to pull at some hidden memory. The other coffin near him creaked open and the lid fell to the floor with a deafening crash. A white haired woman sat up in it rubbing at what looked like a gash like sore on her neck as she stared back at Vincent, unbridled tears running freely down her pale cheeks. She sobbed something unclear and tore savagely at the sore on her neck making it bleed anew.

"He's gone. Don't you feel it? He's _FUCKING GONE! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT? HE'S GONE AND YOUR ALIVE! HE DID THE TRADE!_ His life for yours. You had better be happy to be among the living you sonnuvabitch!" she screamed, the tears running faster down her cheeks. In a rush, he could feel the mocking laughter of a demon in the back of his head. The memories bore down on him, everything, he recalled all, the woman he gave his soul for, the woman Lucrecia, the experiments, the first intruders he had seen in years, Cloud and his company, Sephiroth, this new intruder named Aulia and the mysterious Riven, the fight with the man named Drake. The memories flooded on, and as Vincent watched and relived each memory, Chaos laughed.


	6. Faded Memories

She was the picture of silent raging as she scowled her way through the Nible Mountain range, the rain clouds sounding their thunderous protest beneath their weight of unshed rain. Every now and then Vincent would lag behind and she would pull savagely on the chains bound around his arms and chest which ran to a harness of her own design on her shoulders and would literally pull him off of his feet. She was determined to leave Nible as far behind as possible. Around the fifteenth time Vincent was pulled face first to the ground, Aulia didn't stop to allow him to gain his footing, she snarled and fought against his weight up the sloping stone trail. Blood ran the color of his eyes from all the cuts on his one arm and he struggled with his bound arms to stand up.

"There was nothing you could do." Vincent panted softly as he came to his knees again. The chain harness laxed on her shoulders, and the lead between them clashed to the ground as she halted with startling unexpected speed.

"Say that again." she growled slowly, one reptilian golden eye appeared above her harnessed shoulder as her blood smeared face slowly turned beneath red matted white hair.

"You couldn't have stopped your partner. His actions were his own." Vincent spoke slowly. He remembered how she leaped out of the coffin he hid her in and threw him out of his own just to get at the now darkened stone ball. She had howled like a deranged animal, much like the sounds Vincent remembered himself making beneath Hojo's scalpel. The look in her eye told him that was what he was now dealing with, a deranged animal, scared, unpredictable, alone. One that lost something akin to a mate. He could sympathize to this strange woman. She ransacked the mansions' basement and came up with odd lengths of chain and bonds that Vincent recalled occupying at one time or another, and forced them into the servitude of one great length of chain with her own two hands.

Her eye blazed savagely at him over her partially turned shoulder. He could see her hand, inside it was the darkened stone, clenched above her heart. He could almost see the pain written in her eye, so clear he could read it: HE'S FUCKING GONE! AND YOUR STILL ALIVE! WE WERE SUPPOSED TO TAKE YOU TO THE NORTH LADY DEAD, SO NOW I'LL MAKE YOUR LIFE A LIVING HELL! He wasn't worried about her killing him, Riven said that they were linked by the portrait on the coffin's lid, for a while at least. She closed the gap between them in one spinning kick to the side of his head. He flew side ways about ten feet and she was caught off guard as the chain pulled her with. She launched herself up the side of the mountain at inhuman speeds on all fours dragging him up the crags behind her.

"Listen to me gunslinger!" she howled enraged as she leaped from crevice to crevice, Vincent following the chain all the while barely bearing the life now granted and the gift of feeling pain. "He was worth a lot more than any life on this stinking rock, yours, mine, the North Lady's, Spades', all of them." She yowled dodging around a jutting stone which struck him in the back and he gritted his teeth. His confiscated firearm bounced at her hip (she had to fight him to get it and get him into the chains a fight that didn't go well for him, one that was still being fought). "He had vanished ten years ago" Ten Years. She shook her head to dislodge the thought and tears flew from her eyes.

_I've had enough._ Vincent growled mentally as the flew towards the summit on Aulia's hands and feet. He could feel the demon emerging from its dark cave deep in his mind.

_**Allow me**_. It hissed and Vincent could feel it pulling into his mind as the familiar light around him came. Within seconds Chaos' wings snapped the chains and he free fell. Aulia had leaped down after the falling black form, mistaking it for the man. Fully the blue wyvern, she plummeted after the black form, talons outstretched like an eagle, she caught him and spread her swept back wings. Chaos twisted around and caught her off guard with a bone shattering strike to the face. She hissed and back winged as frost fell from her jaws. He twisted out from her grasp and fell to be caught on his own wings. Aulia rode the wind higher and dropped onto his demonic form with a blast of frozen wind from her throat to his face. Around the aloft combatants, a fanged spectral skull appeared and the attack struck Aulia. She could feel her mind dimming as the force of the attack snapped her right wing radius, causing her to scream a harsh draconic curse as she futilely tried to wing away from the demon. He dug his talons into the soft skin under her wings. She pumped her good wing and beat at his face with her shattered one. He bit savagely into her throat and held on as the flaming blood seared into his face.

The mountain crags soared up to their altitude as they free fell. She latched onto the back of his neck and ripped the muscle there viciously. Chaos moved his weight so that Aulia was angled towards the ground and pulled his teeth free of her bleeding throat. Her eyes were dulled and the blood drenched her sky blue body. She struck with a juicy thud and Chaos stepped off of her motionless body. The stone rolled from the tattered remains of her jacket pocket and came to rest by her shattered skull. The light returned around the demon and Vincent returned to existence. He removed the gun from her belt and returned it to his holster. He watched with little interest as the broken body before him slowly returned to its young human form, the side of Aulia's pale face bashed in badly, her throat continued to bleed, her right arm shattered as the bone was forced through the skin, her feet broken and mangled and the ribs forced up through her chest, yet her eyes didn't seem to show that she felt any of this. He decided it best to leave the dead in rest the way it fell and he turned towards the darkened mansion which was his home for untold years. His boots tapped softly down the faded gray stone trail as rushing rain clouds opened and cleaned away her lifeblood from the mountains' teeth. Vincent only wished to return to the only comfort left to him, he didn't care about these death dealers or their masters, he just wanted to dream of the woman which inadvertently caused him and his humanity to part company a great time ago. A dream, of life that was and could have been. The rain joined the tears which ran down his pale face.

Evening came and went, yet the rain stayed into the dark cold night. Aulia's eyes where still open, but her blood had long joined the rain in its long journey into the darkness under the mountains. Her cold unseeing eyes beheld a phantasm skulking towards her through the freezing cold mists which played over the figure for a moment as it stopped. It dropped down to her level on all fours and cupped her battered face in a bloody hand.

A smile crossed its blurred features as tears ran from eyeless sockets. It was a man, _was_ being the important word. His scalp had been torn nearly clean off, yet, still there were a few clumps of short greenish-black hair. He lifted her broken body to his bare chest, which after a mere few hours of his parting, he seemed to have starved him, made him waste away to a rough seven foot skeleton. Carved into his dead skin was a symbol, and when her body touched it, an unearthly scream irrupted from her motionless lips, the symbol flamed with fresh blood. It was like a leering face which stared hungrily from bloody lines at Aulia.

If only she knew she hadn't truly been torn from Riven. If only he could recall what this dead woman meant to him. It was strange, as he stood there, a darkened piece of materia fell from her hand. He stooped and picked up the little darkened stone. He rolled it in his palm and watched memories which didn't seem to belong to him flicker and fade across his partial mind.

_**Yes, materia is rare. The voice of the Dread Child whispered into his head. The woman of Midgar named Scarlet commissioned that all the pieces in private and profiteering be used in the futile attempt to blow up the Great Stone that the God had summoned. Remember.**_

_**I suppose,**_ he thought, yet it seemed like an extension of his being. A part of him. Then he remembered. The woman in his arms had fought against armed guardsmen to keep the thing while it had glowed a faint silver, she fought and nearly died for it.

_**She was a fool.**_ The Dread Child whispered. Riven watched as Mideel swam up to meet his mental eye. Mideel ten years ago. A great blue and white beast swam deep into the seas around Mideel. It's golden eyes endlessly searching the cool blue green depths.

_She was searching for me, after all that time she was still looking for me?_ Riven confused himself, yet he knew the thought was true. She sank deeper suddenly as a huge fissure loomed to meet her, glowing a faint green which grew stronger by the second. She forced her way deeper, past the teeth of the fissure, the need for oxygen written on her reptilian face. Deeper and deeper until she float just above the surface of an ocean beneath an ocean. She stared hopefully into its green depths and swam on. Blood mixed with the sea water as the capillaries in her nose burst from the pressure, yet she eagerly went deeper. The memory blurred and Riven's half mind screamed with untold agony. The scene blurred into his mental eye was that of Aulia drifting down into the blood of the planet, her wings useless, her eyes empty as if she died there, out of the darkness arose a huge red and black shape which wrapped her in its dark embrace. The smaller blue wyvern was, for a moment, entirely eclipsed by the enormous red spectral one. Then, the red beast seemed to distort itself and be drawn into the shocked and staring lifeless eyes of Aulia. It's body melded with hers and her eyes changed, They became the color of a cold winter moon, and her scales ran with what looked like blood beneath their mirrored surfaces. Her head jerked and frozen spit flew from her jaws to dissipate in the warmth of the Lifestream. Her body contorted and twisted like a man possessed and the spectral intruder forced the helpless wyvern down into the deep green of the planets' life force.

Riven shook his mutilated head forcing the memories away from him.

_I took her over? What am I?_ Riven mouthed, he was no longer capable of human speech due to the eye shaped gash in his throat the size of a fist. Padding out of the rain and darkness behind him was the Dread Child in her true shape. She stood on four sword like limbs each as sharp as a diamond cutter, atop the knives she strode upon, was her mangled body which rested at a height far above the now earth bound Riven's head. She resembled a mutilated cigar on sharpened stilts, her head, or lack of one , was a crater on her rotting flesh colored shoulders with insect like mouth parts projected like piercing teeth. Riven turned, startled, and dropped to the ground in an attitude of servitude and reverence as he clasped Aulia's corpse to his lifeless heart, holding the stone to her forehead keeping her from screaming again. _Mother, I thought you were on the hunt._

_  
_**_Our quarry has returned to its den. Come my son, tonight we will feed. Put that down, we have no use for that._** The bastardized child of life and death spoke. Riven nodded and got to his feet. He laid Aulia to rest in the entry of one of Mount Nible's many stone tunnels. He hesitated for a moment and returned the stone to her cold stiff hand. And he returned to his Mother, Aulia's sightless eyes stared after them as they melded into the rain and fog.

**Hours Earlier**

It had begun to rain and the dark dead house looming above the quiet town named for the mountains above it, welcomed home its one true resident. Vincent moved through the ancient doors into the comfortable familiar darkness within. The confirmatory boom of the doors behind him seemed somewhat safe and satisfying. Moving to the stairs at the back of the entry hall, he stopped. He could almost sense the aura of something like himself gaining power somewhere off in the distance almost like a bad storm. So he sat down on the stairs and waited with his gun in his hands.

* * *

Jade here. Finally back on the sight. I had to track down a couple of my chapters. It's been ages, but soon Wrong Tales'll be updated soon enough. Thanx for lookin'! 


	7. Seven

The doors flew open, and Vincent flung himself on the opportunity of which he had been patiently awaiting, sprang on it like a ravenous wolf on a wounded deer.

The explosive rounds tore through the House of Death's darkened silence with the roaring call of Vincent's gun as the rounds took on his demonic capacity and bored into the tall figure standing motionless in the open doorway. Vincent's firearm sounded again and again, thundering in the silence, roaring on and on, shattering the body of the first intruder. The man in the doorway smiled companionably at him as slug after slug embedded themselves in his dead flesh.

_"Our roles seemed to be reversed, no matter,"_ Riven's lips moved as his mind spoke, and as his lips moved, a slug shattered his lower jaw. But he still smiled a broken smile at Vincent through the gloom, bone fragments and shards of his teeth hanging from bloodless tatters of skin. _"I can't allow you to hurt mother."_ Vincent heard the familiar voice of the Dead Man in his mind, worming in with fake kindness, masking a sinister emotion like a sleeve would hide a dagger. Vincent fired on as Riven walked slowly towards him. A great darkness filled the doorway behind the dead man, and the walking corpse took the majority of Vincent's rounds, leaving the ugly insectile creature relatively unscathed. Riven's eyeless sockets bled at Vincent, giving him the look like that of a wounded crying child, Vincent felt as if he would soon go mad at the prolonged visual contact of these two. Riven never stopped smiling, not as his body was being blown apart, not as his eyes bled, not as parts of his smiling face either fell or were blown off, and not as the Dread Child brought one of its' sharpened forelegs down through the top of his skull. Vincent's barrage faltered and stopped, he could see the claw in the gloom of Riven's eyeless sockets. Riven seemed to sniff once as if holding back a sob, then he crumpled slowly to the floor.

_**Sleep now, my son. Sleep and grow stronger.**_ Vincent didn't hear her nor would he have understood her, but Riven did sleep, he slept in death. Vincent began to grow uneasy, and he could feel a primordial survival instinct rising in him, a feeling that only one other beast had been able to arouse in him. He did not enjoy the memories that that encounter awoke in him. Then he finally recognized the Dread Child for what she was, an experiment just like himself, his mind embraced fully the animalistic rage of the Galian Beast. He growled, his lips pulling into a morbid smile behind his high red collar as he holstered his gun.

"I thought I was rid of you." He snarled as he was ensnared in the transforming light. Vincent was again no more and the wolf like demon relished the dank air, had it been so long that this one fought and lived for Vincent? It had no understanding for time or existence, it lived for the red rage in Vincent's mind, the call of blood. It roared brandishing it's almost bovine horns in the darkened air, lightning revealing the disturbing scene in full. The flash of light illuminated, only for a moment, the Dread Child standing over Riven as he lay on the mansion's floor boards, his skin slowly turning a shade of yellow-green, and the Galian Beast advancing slowly on the thing which dwelled between life and death. Fire shot across the distance and seared the Dread Child's dry leather like skin, igniting it and causing her to cry a warped scream.


End file.
